Monday, 27 August 2012

“Comparative
literature supplies the instructions, the labour, and the glue. Our many “modes
of reading” fix on texts from elsewhere, transform them, then send them out again.
If part of our “selflessness” derives from not having a national “home,”
another part derives from our identification with the processes of interchange,
our investment in methods rather than in subject matter.”

Comparative Literature – A global phenomena

Haun Saussy begins on a congratulatory note for he observes
that never before has comparative literature shown its omnipotence this
clearly. It has even manifested itself in coffee room chat and the study
transnational literature is now certified as worthy of attention. Authors and
critics who write in foreign languages are now read and comparative teaching
and reading are gaining institutionalized form. Thus, the long held controversy
is over, comparative literature is relevant. But this is the very thing that
brings in fresh nightmares for how really relevant is the comparative
literature of mass consumption that globalization has brought to birth?

“Comparative
literature is not only legitimate: now, as often as not, ours is the first
violin that sets the tone for the rest of the orchestra. Our conclusions have
become other people’s assumptions.”

It is indeed wonderful that what comparatists have gifted to
the world has been now assimilated by so many people that we find everyone to
be a comparatist. This inevitably cuts back on quality for while everyone can
spin an armchair theory (without a fluency in three or more languages) there
are few who will have made it their sole job. The omnipotence of comparative
ideas does not call for a huge university department for the discipline for it
shows that comparative literature as a discipline is transdepartmental in
nature.

The nightmare starts here, for though comparative literature
plays the donor and has its conclusions taken up for use in varied fields it is
an unknown one. There is no patent on its theories or conclusions which makes
it vulnerable in a world that strives for recognition on a more material plane.
On the other hand, one can’t say comparative literature is on the decline for
its presence is felt across departments and disciplines. And it might even be
the case then comparative literature is pollinating itself in different sources
and may one day spring up all over with a vengeance. But comparative literature
needs no department – what it needs is that its way of thinking (comparative
reflex) is not tainted.

The genesis – languages in contact

The comparative literature as a term defined and put into
practice is more of a product of the 19th century but literature has
always been comparative in the sense that it has been an amalgamation of
different elements. By studying a literature in awareness of other literatures
one can see what sets them apart and also study the languages by themselves and
notice their individual differences. Thus, you get to see something from a new
and fresh unthought-of perspective.

“Not just influence,
but consciousness of difference and relation, is at work in these collisions.
‘Languages in contact’ spawn hybrid forms – translations, pidgins, creoles,
bilingual villages – and stake out the points of view that allow languages and
literatures to be known as (that is, as if they were) things in themselves. The
logic of comparative literature is as old as literature itself.”

Nationalism

What is paradoxical
indeed is the rise on the thrust of poetry with the era of German and French
nationalism. Contrastive literature was a reflection on the national
differences that came about in themes, attitudes, genres, devices, styles and
occasions of imaginative writing. Like Herder, most believed that each nation
had its own distinct culture and values glorified through its literature.

World Literature

Goethe as early as 1820s foresaw the coming of what he
termed “world literature” due to the increased commerce and travel between nations
and the rapidly increasing human interaction. He also mentions the
mass-consumerism of certain types of literature that will make popular
literature possible which is more of a focus on the distribution of works than
a methodology. It is with Meltzl in 1877 that the future of an institution
specifically for comparative literature is predicted in his article “The
Present Tasks of Comparative Literature”.

But this does not tell us what comparative literature is
supposed to undertake. “Vergleichende Literatur” was a statement calling people
to respond to a new dimension of looking at literature which was still on shaky
soil as far as objectives or methodology went.

“In proposing to
consider world literature as “an elliptical refraction of national literatures,”
“not a set canon of texts but a mode of reading,” David Damrosch reminds us
that there will be as many world literatures as there are national or local
perspectives, that world literature is not a rival but an object, even a
project, of comparative literature. But comparative literature does not own
world literature.”

Due to globalization, transnational cultural and literary
interests have caused a thrust to be placed on the translation of texts and the
study of the correlations in myths and folklore across the globe. Comparative
literature though cosmopolitan in nature is not merely dealing with this
traffic of cross-national interest though it is one of the contributing factors
to the concept of world literature.

What comparative literature was

In 1877 “comparative” meant multiple programmes rolled into
a single word. A new revival followed that caused the barbaric Beowulf,
Nibelungenlied and the rest of the non Greek and Latin epics to be considered
worth poring over seriously for the first time. These were study for the myths
and the insight they provided into societies and cultures of the old world
along with how they influenced development. The Grimm Brothers through their
extensive study o myth and folklores created a new cultural heritage with
distinctive Germanness.

What people failed to understand was that the comparative
method wanted to transcend national frontiers and so it was through comparative
studies into the differences and similarities between different languages that
it was found Germanic, Romance, Celtic, Slavic, Persian and Indic family
languages all were the root forms of the same language.

Then we find the comparative similarities like Michel Breal
in 1877 proposed the Ramayana and Iliad may be based on the same premise. While
the Odyssey, the Aeneid, the Nibelungenlied and the Shahnameh all contain
literary episodes retelling the same story under different names.

Historical methods seek to reconstruct the original face of
a text by its subsequent version while the comparative method on the other
hand, dissolved identities into a common source. “One discipline seized on
differences in order to pare them away; the other did so in other to neutralize
them.”

Meltzl in his conceived program of comparative literature
announces the principle of polyglottism where he suggests that every
comparatist worth his mettle ought to know the basics of German, English,
French, Icelandic, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, Swedish, Spanish and Hungarian
though obviously this has its limitations. One thing meritable out this list is
that it makes comparative literature more than “a science of origins”.

This led comparative literature to now ask what ought to be
included in literature. The nature of the times was leading it to incline more
towards a Goethean horizon in which world literature that transcends national
borders is whatever people consider literature to be.

Since, comparative literature was not a science of origins
it was focal for it to find its objectives a methodology even while in 1877
there was a striving towards literature written in a national language as we
can see in Meltzl’s case where his notion of comparative literature makes a
nation of Europe.

The truth is that literature is a contested term much like
justice, truth or beauty and so making its study comparative would be embracing
it in a wider scope. “Comparative
literature contests the definition of literature as well as aesthetic norms,
genre definitions, literary-historical patterns, and the rest) by throwing
examples and counterexamples at it. Founded in the era of national and
historical scholarship, comparative literature is neither.”

Objectives and Methods of Comparative Literature

“Comparative
literature is engaged with specificity and relation: the specificity of the
object whereby it exceeds established models of discourse, and the relations
that a new reading creates among its objects.”

When making a career in literary studies it is quite
possible to do so without researching actual literary works as aesthetic
theory, literary history, reception are all subjects that are independent
fields. In a field composed of examples and merely theories of what these
examples are of cannot be soley independent. Since it is a method of research
you cannot limit its field of study.

Formerly the scope of comparative studies was considered
literary foreign relations and perhaps also the discovery of obligatory stages
in the evolutions of literary traditions. Another factor on this front is that
there has been a conscious attempt over a period of time to locate this object
of study.

When studying other comparative sciences like philology and
anatomy there is a common reference point found to be their last shared
ancestor. In such comparison to use Aristotle’s metaphor, the researcher is led
to “solve for” the common shared factor called the tertium comparationis or
ground. In cases where the third term is too remote or missing we find the
meaning lost and the comparison falls through. As seen in the cases of
languages in contact comparison enables one to discover the events in the past
that have produced changes or branching and it reads difference as
differentiation which shows the process of how the past is laid over time.

But what is comparative literature discovering? Some say
that the trunk that is discovers is the universality of human experience
through this is only the crust of the matter. When studying literature from a
comparative perspective it is not only the universality of themes that is
looked at but also how this theme is carried to fruitation in different works.
In the case of poetry this is even more difficult and in works of translation
it is possible that nothing of the original has survived – the translator
turned traitor. This poses the question of how one should read a text.

“No longer apologetic
for teaching works they do not read in the original, some comparatist even present
this necessity as a virtue, the consequence of a willingness to deal with
remote traditions and to take collaborative risks.”

Thus, thematic content is not where comparative literature
lies. Perhaps then it is what these works mirror or teach that is more in tune
with the comparative perspective. Alexander Veselovskij (19th
century) and Viktor Zhirmunskij (20th century) look literature to be
the expression of the conditions in the society and believed this was the
comparative perspective for they juxtaposed this to historical sequences.

The search for literariness

On the other hand, literariness (literaturnost) was a term
coined by Tynjanov that is supposed to be the goal of all literary studies and
a common factor in every literary tradition. Considering this, it is not
surprising that this is the goal of comparative research as well.

Paul de Man redefined literariness to be, “the rhetorical or
tropological dimension of language… can be revealed in any verbal event when it
is read textually”. When we consider literariness as a differential concept
linked to ordinary language we have an object of research fit for comparative
literature as literariness too differs with the different uses of language and
so does its message. “Literariness emerges from contexts and methods of
reading, rather than being a property of literature, and it suggests a
category-slippage between a disciplinary product and a restricted class of
objects.”

Strangely when looking at the history of the comparative
approach towards this object of literariness we find it was then labeled rather
loosely as “theory”. Therefore, by default everyone who made or applied Theory
was a comparatist due to the fluctuations of theory in the vocabulary.

Comparative literature is not as just a reading of
literature but reading it literarily with intent study and scrutinity.

Age of Multiculturalism

‘Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism’ a report
published in 1993 by the ACLA’s describes the position of comparative
literature in the new millennium as a field of fields which’s scope can help
crossing national boundaries. Due to the surge of cultural contact there is now
the possibility to study it at the levels of Western and non-Western cultural
productions and also that of pre- and postcontact cultural studies of
productions by colonized peoples along with those based on gender constructions
or sexual, racial or ethnic works.

In the field of cultural production, literary works are just
another field of production. Considering this comparative literature can
analyse the varied possibilities of cultural expression and also the
socio-economic and political aspects. Culture along with literature has now
joined into one of the objects that help define the scope of comparative
literature. Previously comparative literature through its cross-border approach
has done away with national literary history which dealt narrowly with traffic
only within the nation and attempted to minimize cross-boundary interchange.
But that was in the 50s and 60s. Now with the world becoming a global village,
a new objective has to be sought.

“The historical
pattern of comparative literature’s declared objects of study (always
migrating, always retreating) gives no reason to think that the typical objects
of cultural studies lie beyond its powers. We certainly can (and should) ‘do’
cultural research, provided only that its topics are not handed to us as
ready-mades in black boxes but can be subjected to the kinds of analysis,
critique, and contextualization that the discipline has taught comparatist to
perform.”

A shaky discipline

The main reason comparative literature still is threatened
as an institution is due to this lack of set objective that is permanent in
nature. Over the decades we have seen the shifts in objectives as far as
comparative literature goes and with the age of multiculturalism it has shifted
its focus to this new cross-cultural and trans-national phenomenon. Mary Louise
Pratt believes multiculturalism is the product of three transformations that
have come about over the past few years, namely: globalization, democratization
and decolonization.

However, now as we see it, globalization has turned a
complete opposite to multiculturalism as the hegemonic power exercises a
McDonaldisation effect. What this brings into focus is the fact that it was
during the age of multiculturalism that comparative literature found its feet
and now the whole world situation has shifted to bi-polar from multipolar. This
is now the age of globalization and so with this new age, comparative
literature will have to find a way to reach out to the masses again.

Globalisation and the comparative perspective

Due to political circumstances a new breed of peoples have
emerged who may be said to be comparatist by birth. In the case of immigrants
and colonized people, they are comparatist in a daily sense for their lives
exist between two scales of values, vocabularies and idioms. Thus, we see what
W.E.B. DuBois termed as “double consciousness”.

“Thus, the meaning of
comparative literature changes as the frames of reference shifts; although
people share a disciplinary space, that space is organized differently for
each.”

Comparative perspective in an era of inequality

Due to the global I.T. revolution we have information
explosion like never before as noted by Claude Levi-Strauss who notes, “Every
verbal exchange, every line printed, establishes communication between people,
thus, creating an evenness of level, where before there was an information gap
and consequently a greater degree of organization”.

The fact is, globalisation is what has made this reflection
of inequality more glaringly obvious. Comparative literature has focused on
differences but as far as inequality goes; it is a foreign concept for
difference as it exists in the comparative vocabulary is not that stemming from
such factors.

In the case of hybridity, we risk obliterating specific
interactions by a refusal to look intently on what is presented.
Multiculturalism attempts to gloss over inequality by granting all an equal
status which in itself is self deceiving. Due to the amount of information
surrounding us the value of information seems almost nil for there is so much worthless
data scattered around. It seems that only in the past did minute details matter
for there were no other reference points and so, to illustrate:

It mattered when in
the 1631 reprinting of the Authorised Version of the Bible gave the seventh
commandment as “Thou shalt commit adultery,” but the massive array of data
points in a digital photograph could drop much more than three pixels without
anyone’s noticing.

Considering literature in this world we find that to study a
text would be slowing down the pace at which this world goes as intent study
means to quibble over every word presented that would frustrate the attempt of
the modern information system in which faster is better. Thus, with every
search you run on Google you do get a message flashed calculating in how many
seconds your search result was given to you. And yet, one cannot escape this
world of information but literature makes one selective and thus, resistive of
this poor quality matter. But this resistance can only be felt internally for it
in no way curtails the thousands of worthless half-baked essays on Shakespeare
that abound on the internet.

To sum up

It is the interdisciplinary aspect that is comparative
literatures most enduring trait and one that it excels in. We can’t define
comparative literature through a positive relation but through what it is not.
Due to this lack of clear cut perspective there is one blessing that it allows
which is its ability to make comparative research a test bed that can help to
order the ceaseless flow of knowledge both inside and outside the field of
humanities.And so to conclude, comparative literature is a
give-and-take between fields and strives to look at a text minutely in a world
that is more interested in merely judging the information from its speed of
availability.